Celebrity hair can sell for thousands because it is the most personal object a collector can own from a famous person.
In 2016 a lock of John Lennon’s hair sold at auction in Dallas for $35,000 (about £26,400), three times its estimate.
It had been cut when he prepared to play Gripweed in How I Won the War. The buyer was Paul Fraser, chairman of Paul Fraser Collectibles, our sister company. Professional collectors make up a small but established market in hair from presidents and pop stars alike.
Closer than an autograph
Hair does what an autograph does, and goes a step further. Paul Fraser says it “gives you an unparalleled level of intimacy” with the person, “a step beyond owning an autograph or a piece of clothing they wore”.
The habit is old. In the nineteenth century, admirers asked a famous visitor for a snippet of hair much as people ask for an autograph today. Harry Rubenstein, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has said that, more than an autograph, a lock of hair was a sign of affection.
John Reznikoff, who holds the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of hair from historical figures, says people want to be close to someone they admire. His collection held 115 samples when Guinness recognised it in 2001, and it was valued at $1 million (£690,000) at the time.
Proof sets the price
A lock of hair looks like any other, so the price depends on what can be shown about it. Celebrity hair usually reaches the market through the person who cut it: a barber, a hairdresser or a wigmaker. When David Bowie sat for his Madame Tussauds waxwork in 1983, an employee named Wendy Farrier took samples of his hair, with her managers’ permission.
She set that out in a letter to Heritage Auctions when she sold the strands in 2016.
Elvis Presley’s hair was gathered by his personal barber. In 2002 it sold for $115,120 (£72,791), including buyer’s premium, with a letter of authenticity from John Reznikoff’s firm, University Archives. Guinness World Records lists it as the most expensive hair sold at online auction.
A single hair can be enough. In 2015 Catawiki sold one of Napoleon’s, a centimetre long, for £1,687.
Who collects it
Credit: Guinness World Records
Writing about the Lennon sale, The Washington Post recalled the cultural historian Leo Braudy’s 1995 description of celebrity as something audiences use up and discard. It noted that big names now come and go even faster. Against that, the Post argued, a genuine physical trace of a lasting figure is highly attractive. The buyers are collectors, people with a passion for their subject.
Reznikoff’s own collection began when he bought one owned by Margaretta Pierrepont, the wife of Ulysses S. Grant’s attorney general, for $100,000. He usually mounts the locks in a frame with a photograph of the person. “Nobody likes just a clump of hair,” he told The Week.
